Description

You don’t often hear Mauro Pawlowski, Ginger Wildheart, Phil Campbell from Motorhead, The Cardiacs and the U.K Subs in the same sentence… Well now you do…

Released 23rd June so despatched on or just after then…

New album by Mutation – the noise/ metal/ experimental supergoup fronted by GINGER WILDHEART and co-written with Scott Lee Andrews (Exit_International). Guest appearances from Devin Townsend, Phil Campbell (Motorhead), Arty Shepherd (Primitive Weapons). What do you do when everything goes to shit? Not normal, mundane, day-to-day shit, but AAAARRRGGGHHHH KILL EVERYBODY AND START WITH ME shit. Depression, anxiety, misery, torment, whatever you want to call it. It needs a name and it needs a soundtrack. Welcome to Mutation III: Dark Black. Mutation began as the deformed brainchild of Ginger Wildheart, one of British rock’s official living legends and the man behind The Wildhearts, Hey! Hello! and all manner of wildly tuneful and uplifting rock’n’roll shenanigans. This band is different, however. This band is the manifestation of all the horrible stuff that goes on in Ginger’s head. As a result, the first two Mutation albums were laborious in their creation but mind-blowing to all those who heard the: 2013’s ‘The Frankenstein Effect’ was like a Wildhearts album recorded by PCP-guzzling baboons, while ‘Error 500’ was a relentless barrage of squawking, screeching, glitched-to-fuck wrongness. Both featured an ignominious cast of characters that Ginger assembled to facilitate his sonic meltdown, with everyone from Napalm Death and Japanoise icon Merzbow to The Fall’s Mark E. Smith chipping in some wonky nuggets of aural sickness. But even the most extreme moments on the first two Mutation records sound like David Essex’s Hold Me Close compared to the foul, seething, mentally shattered insanity of ‘Mutation III: Dark Black’. A collaboration between Ginger and Scott Lee Andrews of Welsh bass-punk wretches Exit International, /this/ time the madness is very, very real. As messy, unpleasant and unhinged as the writing process for Mutation III: Dark Black was, the end results were manifestly worth the wait. Once again, the album boasts a dazzling array of guest contributions from a great number of similarly demented human beings, including prog metal superstar Devin Townsend, Phil Campbell from Motörhead, Arthur Shepherd of Primitive Weapons, ex-Cardiacs fruitloop Random Jon Poole, Jamie Oliver of UK Subs, Mauro Pawlowski (ex-dEUS) and the mighty Paul Catten (Barrabas, Bed Wetter, Stuntcock, The Sontaran Experiment, ex-Medulla Nocte etc etc). With backing vocals from long-time Ginger comrade Givvi Flynn and various other bug-eyed weirdos thrown in for good measure, the bewildering, mutoid riff carpet-bombing that erupts throughout the album’s deceptively hook-laden barrage is so dense, intense and extreme that it seems to an exerts an almost gravitational pull. From the sing-along hate-spew of Irritant and the synth-pissing jerk’n’roll of opener Authenticity to the balls-out death metal detonations of Toxins and the collapsed-lung descent-into-oblivion of the closing Deterioration is all wrong, all of the time. Mutation III: Dark Black’ is a ridiculously extreme, obnoxious and hostile piece of work. It’s an exorcism, a venting, an uproarious vomiting of malevolent spirits and mental exhaustion. But it’s also an extraordinary piece of art and one of the most obscenely exciting bursts of freewheeling, kamikaze noise that you will ever hear.